Música es por Musa (2014) is a project by artist Macarena Rojas that explores the relationship between music and visual expression. The exhibition is the result of an interest in understanding the effects that music generates in the brain; ranging from abstract and emotional meanings to the languages that each of us develop to codify and reproduce music.

Similar to mathematics, music presents a logical structure that allows it to be constructed, and therefore, to be decoded. Musicians visualise musical structure, represented in the space, through a specific language: the music notes. Due to the lack of a musical alphabet, the artist aims to understand the music from a visual perspective, decoding the sound in visual forms created by herself intuitively. To achieve this, Rojas has invented her own musical codes: a system of musical notes played by musicians that is then recorded into audio. The artist has also developed a mechanism through which the audience can participate in the process of the musical creation: they can interpret a diagram or musical note drawn over pictures of outer space. This way a visitor can produce movements with his or her hands that thanks to a Theremin-an electronic device that generates musical tones of various frequencies in response to movement- are translated into sounds that allude to science fiction movies and evoke the mystery that science and space generate for us.

The association between image and sound has been always in constant development in the scientific field. But, with recent technological innovations, this link has become more obvious. The media landscape is rapidly evolving, naturally bringing forth new aesthetic perspectives. These visuals are the source of the artist’s inspiration; the ability of science to condense concepts into written formulas and its ability to synthesize information and express it in a visual way.

Macarena Rojas [Lima, 1985]
Macarena Rojas has a Bachelor’s in Communication Science from the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC), Lima. She has taken photography courses at the Centro de la Imagen and the International Center of Photography of New York. She has also participated in various collective exhibitions in Peru, The United States, Colombia, Brazil and Italy.